Abandoned by Paul Theroux: the diary of a sad ex-wife who sadly can’t write

When I interviewed Paul Theroux 21 years ago at his home in Hawaii, there were already rumours that his ex-wife Anne had written a book about him. In fact their son Marcel said in an interview that she had sent Paul the manuscript. Theroux denied it to me, and said breezily that he wished Anne would write a book, because then she’d have greater respect for the work involved. And:

I don’t see that if she wrote a book it’s going to be an attack on me. I don’t think it’ll be ‘I discovered his lies’. So it doesn’t worry me. I’m sure she’d show it to me, but it doesn’t really matter — I’m happy to just buy it off the bookstalls.

So is this the long-awaited book? Has it been sitting in a drawer gathering dust over the years? If so, why publish it now, when Paul Theroux is probably better known as the father of Louis than as the great novelist and travel writer he once was? Anne only explains in a postscript that she wrote the book soon after Paul left her, but by then was working as a relationship counsellor and felt she could not publish it until she retired. She has now retired, so here it is.

Is it worth the long wait? Not really. It is based on a diary she kept in 1990, the year Paul left her. They had married in Kampala in 1967, when they were both teaching there. She was already pregnant with Marcel, and Louis quickly followed. They moved to Singapore for three years, before settling in England. But Paul never really settled anywhere for long. He went off to teach in Virginia for a term and then embarked on the first of the long travels that would make his name and fortune in The Great Railway Bazaar.